From Strindberg to Ekman: Swedish Literature and the American Audience

From Strindberg to Ekman: Swedish
Literature and the American Audience
ROCHELLE WRIGHT
Literature originally written in Swedish has entered the American
mainstream in two categories. The first is the mystery novel, in
particular the ten police procedurals published between 1965 and
1975 by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, all of which were rapidly trans­lated
into English, favorably reviewed, and popular with readers. The
second and more significant category is children's literature. Writers like
Astrid Lindgren, originator of Pippi Långstrump (Longstocking) and
other memorable characters, and the Fenno-Swedish Tove Jansson; cre­ator
of the Mumin (Moomin) family, have endeared themselves to Ameri­can
children and their parents for decades. Maria Gripe, Inger and Lasse
Sandberg, and many others have followed in their footsteps. In the fol­lowing
discussion I will nevertheless concentrate on belles lettres for adults,
or Literature with a capital L, that is not relegated to a subgenre (however
skillful the execution thereof). Though I cannot provide full answers, I
would like to raise the following questions: What gets translated, and
why? Which works find an audience, and why?
It has periodically been claimed, with some hyperbole, that in order
to be published in the United States, an author whose language is not
English must first win the prestigious Nobel Prize. At least for Swedish
writers, there is, in fact, less direct correlation between the prize and
translation into English than one might expect An obvious case in point
is August Strindberg (1849-1912), who remained an outsider to the Swed­ish
literary establishment during his lifetime and was a mortal enemy of
Carl David af Wirsén, the perpetual secretary of the Swedish Academy.
Not surprisingly, Strindberg was never a serious candidate either for the
prize or for membership in the august council of eighteen that awards it.
ROCHELLE WRIGHT is professor of Scandinavian and comparative literature, cin­ema
studies, and women's studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
Her publications include English translations of three Swedish novels, the section
"Literature after 1 9 5 0 " in A History of Swedish Literature, and The Visible Wall:
Jews and Other Ethnic Outsiders in Swedish Film (1998). Her current research
focuses on the novels of Kerstin Ekman.
Strindberg's international reputation was secure long before he was
fully accepted in his homeland. Unlike Ibsen, however, Strindberg did
not find early champions in the English-speaking world who translated
all his major plays within his lifetime and promoted them aggressively.
Furthermore, unlike Ibsen, Strindberg's overall production is vast and
encompasses, in addition to drama, novels, fictional autobiographies,
short stories, essays, quasi-scientific works, and poetry, not to mention
many volumes of letters. No single translator has attempted more than a
tiny fraction of this whole, and even today much remains inaccessible
without a reading knowledge of Swedish. Yet many of the most frequently
performed plays (and even a couple of the more influential novels, such
as Hemsöborna [ T h e People/Natives of Hemsö] and Inferno) have been trans­lated
multiple times, and for these works there may not be a dominant or
standard English-language version.
The total number of Strindberg translations is impossible to estimate,
in part because translations and adaptations of individual plays are
often commissioned for particular stage productions but never published.
What is clear is that both British and American versions of works like The
Father, M i s s Julie, Creditors, The D a n c e of Death, A D r e a m Play, and The
Ghost Sonata continue to be produced and performed, and that in the last
couple of decades there have been important new translations of
Strindberg's prose. Other works that remain popular in Sweden, for in­stance
the historical plays M a s t e r Olof Gustav Vasa, and E r i k X I V , have
never really found an American audience, either in print or on the stage.
Walter Johnson's translations of these and other historical dramas, pub­lished
by the University of Washington Press several decades ago, are
now out of print and unlikely to be reissued.
Strindberg's literary position in the English-speaking world has sel­dom
been connected to his Swedishness. Contentious, oppositional, and
frank about sexual matters, he apparently never attracted a large share of
the fundamentally conservative Swedish-American audience. Strindberg's
impact today is correlated to his contribution to the evolution of Western
drama, specifically to the naturalist and expressionist movements, and
to his influence on important American playwrights like Eugene O'Neill
and Edward Albee. In both contexts the Strindberg canon is defined in an
increasingly narrow manner to comprise a very small subset of his total
dramatic production.
In 1909 Selma Lagerlöf (1858-1940) became the first Swedish winner
of the Nobel Prize; in 1914 she also became the first woman member of the
Swedish Academy. Lagerlöf garnered a great deal of international atten­tion
from the beginning of her career; in particular, her first novel, Gösta
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B e r l i n g s S a g a (1891), was widely admired and translated. A compelling
storyteller who drew on folklore and oral tradition, Lagerlöf may be clas­sified
as a neoromantic. One possible explanation for her popularity,
both in Sweden and abroad, is demographic. In Gösta B e r l i n g s S a g a and
other early narratives, Lagerlöfs subject matter and primary themes —
provincial life in previous generations and the redemptive power of love—
could speak to a relatively unsophisticated reading public as well as the
literati. Her religious moralizing may have endeared her to devout Swed­ish-
Americans. There is considerable evidence, moreover, that Lagerlöfs
primary audience was female;1 then as now, most books were purchased
and read by women. Presumably because of their anticipated popular
appeal, virtually all of Lagerlöf's early works were translated relatively
quickly, before the Nobel award: Gösta B e r l i n g in 1898; Osynliga länkar
(1894), as T h e Invisible Links, in 1899; A n t i k r i s t s miraklet (1897), as The
M i r a c l e s of A n t i c h r i s t , in 1899; E n herrgårdssägen (1899), as F r o m a Swedish
Homestead, in 1901; and Nils Holgerssons underbara resa genom Sverige (1906-
7), as T h e Wonderful Adventures of N i l s , in 1907. American publishers
include Little, Brown & Co. and Doubleday; rival British editions of sev­eral
works also appeared. The Nobel Prize thus did not introduce Lagerlöf
to the American audience, but it reinforced the perception of her as an
important writer, encouraged translations of subsequent works, and
motivated keeping older translations in print.
Unfortunately, all the early Lagerlöf translations are flawed. The vari­ous
translators, including Velma Swans on Howard and Pauline Bancroft
Flack, sometimes appear to lack the necessary linguistic skills in either
Swedish or English; errors and stylistic infelicities abound. The English-language
versions frequently convey an archaic quality that is completely
at odds with the colloquial, conversational tone of the original texts and
that leads to a false perception of Lagerlöf as quaint and dated. As far as
I can determine, most of Lagerlöf's novels and stories, with the exception
of Gösta Berling and the children's book Nils Holgersson, gradually waned
in popularity in the English-speaking world and went out of print before
World War II. Contributing factors were probably the decline of her repu­tation
in Sweden and the diminishing size and decreasing sense of eth­nic
solidarity of the Swedish-American population.
In the last fifteen years or so, in part thanks to feminist scholarship,
there has been renewed attention to Lagerlöf in Sweden. This revival has
not, by and large, led to a resurgence of interest in her works in the United
States. One new and greatly improved English-language version of a
minor masterpiece, The Löwensköld R i n g , appeared in England in 1991
under the aegis of Norvik Press—though by an American translator, Linda
235
Schenck—and has been a modest success.2 In the United States, Penfield
Press recently published several Lagerlöf volumes, including Gösta
B e r l i n g ' s Saga, but rather than commissioning fresh translations chose to
reissue slightly edited versions of old ones, with no critical apparatus
and a preface and introduction of only a single page apiece.3 In August
1997 the editor of the Lagerlöf series, Greta Anderson, sent me two of the
books and suggested that I contact the publisher, Joan Liffring-Zug
Bourret, about the possibility of retranslating Jerusalem. Commending the
press for its rediscovery of Lagerlöf but pointing out the drawbacks of
republishing outdated texts, I replied enthusiastically that I would in­deed
be interested in undertaking the task. After some delay, my offer was
declined, with the explanation that "much of the impact of Lagerlöfs
work for today's reader lies in the realization of the universality of char­acter,
time, and place. Some of the more archaic passages, in many in­stances,
tend to enhance the strength of this quality."4 Leaving aside the
fact that inappropriate and inaccurate archaisms, not to mention other
errors, hardly strengthen the universality of anything, I suspect that eco­nomics
played an unacknowledged role in the publisher's apparent
about-face: since the copyright on old Lagerlöf translations has expired,
reissuing them is inexpensive, whereas present-day translators, myself
included, expect remuneration. Unfortunately, it is highly unlikely that
any other commercial press will republish Lagerlöf as long as the Penfield
Press volumes are in print.
Lagerlöfs contemporary, Verner von Heidenstam (1859-1940), a
member of the Academy since 1912, received the Nobel award in 1916. In
this instance, a stronger connection between the prize and translation
into English may be discerned, as indicated by the title—Sweden's L a u r e ­ate:
Selected Poems—of the volume of Heidenstam's poetry that appeared
in 1919. To a greater degree than was the case with Lagerlöf, the work of
Heidenstam seems to have been translated with the Swedish-American
audience specifically in mind. Two volumes of prose from earlier de­cades
were issued by the American-Scandinavian Foundation in the 1920s,
by which time Heidenstam had ceased writing: K a r o l i n e r n a (1897-98),
T h e Charles M e n , in 1920, and S v e n s k a r n a och deras hövdingar (1908-10),
The Swedes and Their Chieftains, in 1925. That same year Knopf published
Folkungaträdet (1905-07), The T r e e of the F o l k u n g s . All are subjective, na­tionalistic
interpretations of Swedish history. Since the 1920s were the
heyday of Swedish America, it seems likely that targeted readers were the
children and grandchildren of immigrants in search of their glorious
heritage. The translator of all four Heidenstam volumes was C. W. Stork.
A third writer associated with the national romantic movement, the
236
poet Erik Axel Karlfeldt (1864-1931), received the award posthumously.
Of his production, only A r c a d i a Borealis: Selected Poems has appeared in
English, in 1938. Karlfeldt's limited exposure in the United States was
determined in large part by his choice of genre rather than subject matter.
Poetry, especially rhymed and metered verse, is notoriously difficult to
translate, and regardless of language of origin, it seldom sells well.
In contrast to predecessors like Lagerlöf and Heidenstam, Pär
Lagerkvist (1891-1974), who was awarded the Nobel in 1951, apparently
did not attract a primarily Swedish-American audience. One reason for
his appeal across ethnic boundaries may be that much of his literary
production is "Swedish" neither in setting nor in subject matter. Of the
novels that established his international reputation, The Dwarf takes place
during the Italian Renaissance and explores the nature of evil, while
Barabbas, The Sibyll, The Death of A h a s v e r u s , and other prose narratives
expand on biblical stories and address ageless existential questions. These
works, which originally appeared in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, were
all translated within a year or two, often by Alan Blair, published by
prestigious presses like Random House and Hill & Wang, and issued in
paperback. The Dwarf, Barabbas, and The Sibyll remain in print today. One
factor in the relative longevity of American interest in Lagerkvist may be
that his spare, simple, elegant prose has a timeless quality that survives
translation relatively unscathed.
Lagerkvist was also a playwright and theoretician of modern drama.
Though he builds on the expressionist tradition originating with
Strindberg, his primary sources of artistic inspiration are international
rather than specifically Swedish. The English-language volume M o d e r n
Theatre: Seven Plays and a n Essay appeared in 1966, many decades after
Swedish publication of most of the works included, and places his work
in the context of European theater history. As with Lagerkvist's novels,
the presumed intended audience is not a Swedish-American one but—in
this instance — anyone interested in the evolution of twentieth-century
drama.
Eyvind Johnson (1900-1976) and Harry Martinson (1904-1978)
shared the Nobel Prize in 1974. In neither instance were English transla­tions
of their work published in immediate response to the award. With
regard to Johnson, however, a possible parallel to Lagerkvist may be pro­posed,
since among translated works, historical fiction with a non-Swed­ish
setting predominates: Strändernas svall ( 1 9 4 6 ) / R e t u r n to Ithaca (1952)
is a retelling of the Odyssey; Drömmar om rosor och eld ( 1 9 4 9 ) / D r e a m s of
Roses and F i r e (1984) is set in the France of Cardinal Richelieu; H a n s nådes
tid (1960)/ The Days of H i s Grace (1968) takes place during the reign of
237
Charlemagne. Only the autobiographical N u var det 1 9 1 4 (1934)/1914
(1970) concerns a more immediate past and is set in Sweden.
Two early works of Martinson were translated into English almost
immediately: Kap Farväl (1933)/Cape Farewell (1934) and Nässlorna blomma
(1935)/Flowering Nettle (1936). Vägen till Klockrike (1948) appeared in 1955
as The Road. The last two were published in England; I have never lo­cated
them in an American library and presume that they had relatively
limited distribution here. Martinson's poem cycle A n i a r a , from 1956, is
the only work to appear in English after the prize, in 1991.
Vilhelm Moberg (1898-1973), a rebel and iconoclast like Strindberg,
cultivated an outsider role vis-å-vis the literary establishment and never
won the Nobel Prize. His novels are nevertheless critically acclaimed
and have remained extraordinarily popular with Swedish readers. In the
summer of 1998, viewers of Röda R u m m e t ( T h e R e d R o o m ) , a television
program that focuses on literature, chose Moberg's emigrant tetralogy as
"århundradets bok," the Swedish book of the century. The emigrant se­ries,
which appeared in Sweden between 1949 and 1959, has also been
successful in the United States, in particular, it seems, among Swedish-
Americans, no doubt because the subject matter has an intrinsic appeal
to that particular audience. The emigrant novels reached a more general
readership as well, however, especially after the second volume, U n t o a
Good Land, became a Book of the Month Club selection in 1954. Moberg's
novels have been almost continually in print in the United States since
their first publication; in 1978 the complete versions of volumes three
and four, T h e Settlers and Last Letter H o m e , even replaced the conflated
final volume of the original Simon & Schuster edition, and the entire
tetralogy was issued in paperback by Popular Library. More recently the
novels have been republished by the Minnesota Historical Society Press.
Interest in the emigrant tetralogy led to the translation of a later novel,
D i n s t u n d på j o r d e n (1963)/ O u r T i m e on E a r t h (1965), about a Swedish
American of Moberg's own generation, and eventually, in 1988, to an
English-language version of his volume of essays about Swedish settle­ment
in United States, D e n okända släkten/The Unknown Swedes. Even be­fore
the emigrant novels established Moberg's reputation in the United
States, several works from the 1930s and 1940s —the partially autobio­graphical
Knut Toring series and the historical novel R i d e This N i g h t—
had appeared in English.
Moberg belonged to the so-called 1930s generation in Swedish let­ters,
a group of writers from impoverished backgrounds who were largely
self-taught and whose fiction frequently focused on their class of origin.
Buoyed by American sales of The Emigrants and the forthcoming publica-
238
tion of U n t o a Good Land, Sonja Bergvall, in charge of foreign rights at
Sweden's largest publishing house, Albert Bonniers Förlag, hoped to
attract attention in the United States to another working-class writer, Ivar
Lo-Johansson. On 17 December 1953 she sent Moberg's translator, Gustaf
Lannestock, copies of two of Lo-Johansson novels, Analfabeten (The Illiter­ate)
and Gårdfarihandlaren ( T h e P e d d l e r ) , requesting his opinion of them
and of their possibilities in America.5
The Swedish-born Lannestock, though a businessman by profession,
was an extremely perceptive and discriminating translator. Lo-Johansson,
like Moberg, was sometimes controversial but popular and widely praised
by critics. The autobiographical narratives Lannestock was asked to con­sider,
Lo-Johansson's most recent publications at the time, are unusual
among works by Swedish proletarian writers in that they are short and
funny. Though the setting, rural Sweden during and immediately after
World War I, is unfamiliar to an American audience, the story of the
teenage protagonist's rebellion and of a society in transition is easily
accessible across cultural and linguistic boundaries. Bergvall's implicit
conviction that the Lo-Johansson novels could become as popular as the
Moberg series seems optimistic, but not farfetched.
On 22 January 1954 Lannestock replied with great enthusiasm:
The Ivar Lo-Johansson books have arrived and I have read
both of them with profound interest. Not for a longtime have I
had the refreshing experience to find such a charming sense of
humor in a Swedish writer of this quality. I shall indeed do all I
can to have them presented to American publishers, and I have
already taken the liberty to send résumés to my friend Harold
Strauss, Editor-in-Chief to Alfred Knopf, Inc. Should he be inter­ested,
I will forward the books to be read by their own Swedish
readers.
Lannestock goes on to request lists of sales and translations, information
on the author, favorable reviews, and publicity materials to aid him in the
placements of the novels.
A month later, on 23 February 1954—which coincidentally was Lo-
Johansson's fifty-third birthday—a follow-up letter from Lannestock re­ported
on his efforts:
I mailed a report of the two books to three firms I have con­nections
with. One has not yet answered; one has replied that
they know of the author but have "unfavorable reports" of his
239
earlier books. The most important one, Alfred Knopf, writes that
they have considered the Lo-Johansson books ever since 1939
when Mr. Knopf was in Stockholm. Analfabeten was rejected
last year after their Swedish readers had advised them it was "a
depressing, naive and rather crude peasant tale."6
Undeterred, Lannestock relates that he had begun translating
Analfabeten anyway. On 1 March 1954 Sonja Bergvall sent a contract au­thorizing
him to translate Analfabeten and Gårdfarihandlaren "into the
American language" and to act as Bonniers's agent for sales of American
rights. Just a week later, on 8 March 1954, Lannestock assured her that he
was going ahead with the work and mentioned hopefully that Knopf,
despite the earlier rejection, had expressed interest in seeing it.
On 17 April 1954 Lannestock informed Sonja Bergvall that he had
sent several chapters of Analfabeten to Knopf and that "the rest should be
ready shortly." His admiration for Lo-Johansson had deepened, and he
now made additional inquiries about an earlier novel, Bara en mor/Only a
Mother,
There ensued a silence of more than half a year. On 1 November 1954
Lannestock notified Sonja Bergvall that the English manuscript of
Analfabeten had been examined by six publishing houses, all of which
had turned it down. Though he was still trying, he told Bergvall to place
the translation directly if she could, their previous agreement notwith­standing.
On 13 December 1954 Bergvall replied to Lannestock:
Both Mr. Lo-Johansson and myself are very glad and very
grateful that you are taking so much trouble over Analfabeten. It is
very sad, however, that the book does not seem to appeal so much
to American publishers as one would have hoped. I suppose
Simon & Schuster who have already had success with a Swed­ish
author are among the publishers who have seen your trans­lation.
Mr. Lo-Johansson feels that, being a "funnier" book, per­haps
Gårdfarihandlaren might have a better chance. What do you
think of his opinion?
She thanked Lannestock for his offer of a free hand to place the novel
directly, but still thought he was more likely to succeed.
And there the correspondence ends. Lannestock never did find an
American publisher for his translation of Analfabeten. After his death, the
manuscript, along with his other papers, was deposited at the Emigrant
240
Institute in Växjö, Sweden, where it remains today. With the exception of
the erotic novel Lyckan, translated as Bodies of Love in the 1960s, no work
of Lo-Johansson appeared in English until the 1990s, when the short­lived
Scandinavian Literature in Translation series at the University of
Nebraska Press published my English version of Godnatt, jord/Breaking
Free, and Robert E. Bjork's of Bara en mor/Only a M o t h e r . In 1995 Camden
House issued my translation of Gårdfarihandlaren/Peddling M y Wares, the
second novel in the series that had so appealed to Gustaf Lannestock
more than forty years earlier. All three volumes have sold abysmally.
What can be learned from this cautionary tale? Why didn't
Lannestock's efforts pay off? There is no way to know for certain, but
some possible contributing factors may be proposed. First, it appears that
Swedish authors have no intrinsic appeal and no coattails. Moberg's
success in America did not persuade publishers to take a chance on Lo-
Johansson, to them an unknown with no name recognition and no obvi­ous
audience niche. Second, even a skilled and dedicated translator,
known and respected for his previous work, can do little to counteract
negative readers' reports, especially since these reports remain anony­mous
and unavailable to outsiders. Third—and this is a bit of practical
advice, not supposition—no translator should work on spec, that is, with­out
first having signed a publisher's contract.
With regard to the embarrassingly low sales of recent Lo-Johansson
translations, the lesson is that academic presses often cannot afford to
market books effectively. Their catalogues seldom reach people outside
the university community; even within that group, few people will buy a
novel by an unfamiliar writer without at least having read a favorable
review. By publishing Swedish novels only in hardback and at exorbi­tant
prices with the motivation that only a few libraries will order them—
a line of reasoning that soon becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy—univer­sity
presses often doom books to the remainder table. Though I suppose
an expensive and essentially undisseminated translation is marginally
better than none at all, academic publishers, with few exceptions, simply
are not an appropriate venue for translated fiction. Unfortunately, in
today's publishing climate, they may be the only venue available.
Though translators from some languages can actually make a living
as practitioners of the art, this is hardly the situation with regard to Swed­ish.
To my knowledge, there is currently in the world only one full-time
professional translator of literary texts from Swedish to English, the enor­mously
prolific Englishwoman Joan Tate. In Great Britain, and some­times
in the United States, commercial publishers turn to her, or to some­one
she recommends, on the rare occasions when they option a Swedish
241
work, with the result that American readers of contemporary Swedish
fiction may encounter a distinctly British flavor that seems "foreign" but
in quite the wrong way, with completely misleading associations. In the
United States, most translators of modern Swedish literature are academ­ics
motivated by love for a particular work who are paid little or nothing,
discover that literary translation seldom counts for much in promotion
and tenure decisions, and often spend years peddling their novel or po­etry
collection to university presses before finding one that grudgingly
will agree to publish it. Under these circumstances, it is surprising that
any work of Swedish literature ever gets translated and published at all.
When something does appear, it is often thanks to the commitment
and persistence of the translator. Robert E. Bjork, for instance, is single-handedly
responsible for the fact that six novels of Jan Fridegård, a con­temporary
of Moberg and Lo-Johansson, were published in the Univer­sity
of Nebraska series between 1985 and 1990. Similarly, the novels of
Lars Gustafsson are available in English primarily due to the efforts of
the late Yvonne Sandstroem and her cooperation with New Directions, a
small press specializing in avant garde literature. Occasionally, how­ever,
a work of Swedish literature is issued by a more mainstream pub­lisher
aiming to reach a particular audience. In this regard the novels of
Kerstin Ekman provide an illuminating example.
Born in 1933, Ekman began her career as a writer of crime fiction.
Although she was elected a member of the Swedish Academy in 1978
and has long been considered one of the country's foremost contempo­rary
novelists, no work of hers was published in English until 1996,
when Blackwater (Händelser vid vatten) appeared with St. Martin's Press.7
I suspect that the catalyst was the previous success in both England and
the United States of Danish writer Peter Høeg's S m i l l a ' s Sense of Snow.
Both S m i l l a and Blackwater may be classified as "serious fiction" but in­corporate
an exotic setting and components of mystery and suspense;
and both, though in quite different ways, criticize technology in the ser­vice
of hidden economic interests and promote ecological values. Black-water
was favorably reviewed in the N e w York Times Book Review but pro­moted
primarily as a mystery novel. Presumably to capitalize on the suc­cess
of Blackwater, in 1997 Doubleday published a much earlier and more
straightforward work of crime fiction, D e tre små mästarna (1961), as Under
the S n o w . 8 Both novels were translated by Joan Tate. Quite coincidentally,
at virtually the same time Norvik Press issued a completely divergent
work, Witches' Rings (Häxringarna, 1974), the first novel of a tetralogy that
provides an alternative history of the railroad town Katrineholm by por­traying
the lives of women and children. Norvik Press, distributed in the
242
United States by Dufour Editions, specializes in Scandinavian literature
but aims at an academic market, possibly hoping, in this instance, to
build on the success of Lagerlöf's The Löwensköld R i n g . Both novels were
written by women, focus largely on female characters, and lend them­selves
to inclusion in courses on women's literature, and both were trans­lated
by Linda Schenck.
At present, Swedish literature has little or no impact in the United
States. The sole audience likely to seek out a translated work simply
because the author was a Swede—that is, second- or third-generation
Swedish Americans who feel a sense of kinship with the country and
culture of their forebears—is declining in number and advancing in age.
The American educational system, from elementary school through the
university, does little to foster an interest in or awareness of foreign litera­ture
in general; many teachers—indeed, many English departments—
present and discuss all literary texts, regardless of country and language
of origin, as if they were written in English. With the increasing domina­tion
of television and other forms of popular entertainment, fewer and
fewer people read at all.
There is, furthermore, no such thing as the "American audience" in
an all-inclusive sense. Unlike Sweden, the United States does not have a
handful of prominent newspapers that carry on a cultural debate fol­lowed
by a large percentage of the population. Both major Stockholm
papers, D a g e n s N y h e t e r and Svenska Dagbladet, frequently publish, in ad­dition
to reviews of new works of literature, feature articles about both
Swedish and non-Swedish authors, written by prominent literary schol­ars
and critics. The closest equivalents in the United States are the N e w
Y o r k Times Book R e v i e w and the N e w Y o r k Review of Books, which reach a
much smaller percentage of the population, a group assumed to be in­trinsically
interested in and well-informed about literary matters. What
the United States does have are many different audiences or population
subgroups with special interests that are targeted by the publishing in­dustry:
readers of historical fiction, of romance novels, of mysteries, of
fantasy and science fiction, and so forth. In the last decade or two, vari­ous
changes in the way books are marketed and distributed—not only
this focus on niche audiences, but also the dominance of bookstore chains
and the relentless promotion of megabits—have made it more and more
difficult to publish serious literature of any kind. Under these circum­stances,
the occasional discovery of a Swedish writer by an American
audience can only be described as serendipity.
243
ENDNOTES
1. Of the more than 10,000 letters addressed to Lagerlöf now housed at the
Royal Library, Stockholm, approximately 65 percent are from women, accord­ing
to Jennifer Watson-Madler, who has worked extensively with the collection
(e-mail message from Watson-Madler to Rochelle Wright, 4 October 1998).
2. In her afterword, Schenck provides a detailed comparison with the ear­lier
English version from 1928 and makes a compelling argument for fresh,
contemporary translations of classic works of literature.
3. The publisher defines the procedure as "minor editing of only the me­chanics"
(letter from Joan Liffring-Zug Bourret to Rochelle Wright, 3 December
1997); in other words, typos and obvious mistakes in grammar and punctua­tion
are corrected, but nothing else. The editor does not know Swedish and has
not examined the original texts. The lack of a serious critical introduction to
Lagerlöfs oeuvre or to the individual works also limits the usefulness of the
translations. The Penfield Press Gösta Berling is based on Lillie Tucker's rendi­tion,
first published in England in 1898 and reissued by the American-Scandina­vian
Foundation in 1918.
4. Letter from Joan Liffring-Zug Bourret to Rochelle Wright, 3 December
1997.
5. The correspondence between Sonja Bergvall and Gustaf Lannestock is
stored in the Placement Division files of the archive at Albert Bonniers Förlag,
Stockholm. Bergvall's letters are quoted with the permission of Bonniers; the
Emigrant Institute, Växjö, allows citation of the Lannestock letters. Both Bergvall
and Lannestock, though native Swedes, wrote in English; after many decades
in the United States, Lannestock felt more comfortable using that language.
6. Knopf could not have considered Analfabeten and Gårdfarihandlaren in
1939, since they had not yet been published; the reference may be to Godnatt,
jord (1933) or, more likely, Bara en mor (1939).
7. Ekman resigned in 1989 in protest over the Academy's lukewarm de­fense
of Salman Rushdie.
8. Readers of Ekman's work in the Swedish original might justifiably con­sider
this a more appropriate rubric for the transitional novel Pukehornet, which
takes its title from the slum district of Uppsala where the story is set but fea­tures
a presumed corpse hidden under snowdrifts in the forest.
244

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From Strindberg to Ekman: Swedish
Literature and the American Audience
ROCHELLE WRIGHT
Literature originally written in Swedish has entered the American
mainstream in two categories. The first is the mystery novel, in
particular the ten police procedurals published between 1965 and
1975 by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, all of which were rapidly trans­lated
into English, favorably reviewed, and popular with readers. The
second and more significant category is children's literature. Writers like
Astrid Lindgren, originator of Pippi Långstrump (Longstocking) and
other memorable characters, and the Fenno-Swedish Tove Jansson; cre­ator
of the Mumin (Moomin) family, have endeared themselves to Ameri­can
children and their parents for decades. Maria Gripe, Inger and Lasse
Sandberg, and many others have followed in their footsteps. In the fol­lowing
discussion I will nevertheless concentrate on belles lettres for adults,
or Literature with a capital L, that is not relegated to a subgenre (however
skillful the execution thereof). Though I cannot provide full answers, I
would like to raise the following questions: What gets translated, and
why? Which works find an audience, and why?
It has periodically been claimed, with some hyperbole, that in order
to be published in the United States, an author whose language is not
English must first win the prestigious Nobel Prize. At least for Swedish
writers, there is, in fact, less direct correlation between the prize and
translation into English than one might expect An obvious case in point
is August Strindberg (1849-1912), who remained an outsider to the Swed­ish
literary establishment during his lifetime and was a mortal enemy of
Carl David af Wirsén, the perpetual secretary of the Swedish Academy.
Not surprisingly, Strindberg was never a serious candidate either for the
prize or for membership in the august council of eighteen that awards it.
ROCHELLE WRIGHT is professor of Scandinavian and comparative literature, cin­ema
studies, and women's studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
Her publications include English translations of three Swedish novels, the section
"Literature after 1 9 5 0 " in A History of Swedish Literature, and The Visible Wall:
Jews and Other Ethnic Outsiders in Swedish Film (1998). Her current research
focuses on the novels of Kerstin Ekman.
Strindberg's international reputation was secure long before he was
fully accepted in his homeland. Unlike Ibsen, however, Strindberg did
not find early champions in the English-speaking world who translated
all his major plays within his lifetime and promoted them aggressively.
Furthermore, unlike Ibsen, Strindberg's overall production is vast and
encompasses, in addition to drama, novels, fictional autobiographies,
short stories, essays, quasi-scientific works, and poetry, not to mention
many volumes of letters. No single translator has attempted more than a
tiny fraction of this whole, and even today much remains inaccessible
without a reading knowledge of Swedish. Yet many of the most frequently
performed plays (and even a couple of the more influential novels, such
as Hemsöborna [ T h e People/Natives of Hemsö] and Inferno) have been trans­lated
multiple times, and for these works there may not be a dominant or
standard English-language version.
The total number of Strindberg translations is impossible to estimate,
in part because translations and adaptations of individual plays are
often commissioned for particular stage productions but never published.
What is clear is that both British and American versions of works like The
Father, M i s s Julie, Creditors, The D a n c e of Death, A D r e a m Play, and The
Ghost Sonata continue to be produced and performed, and that in the last
couple of decades there have been important new translations of
Strindberg's prose. Other works that remain popular in Sweden, for in­stance
the historical plays M a s t e r Olof Gustav Vasa, and E r i k X I V , have
never really found an American audience, either in print or on the stage.
Walter Johnson's translations of these and other historical dramas, pub­lished
by the University of Washington Press several decades ago, are
now out of print and unlikely to be reissued.
Strindberg's literary position in the English-speaking world has sel­dom
been connected to his Swedishness. Contentious, oppositional, and
frank about sexual matters, he apparently never attracted a large share of
the fundamentally conservative Swedish-American audience. Strindberg's
impact today is correlated to his contribution to the evolution of Western
drama, specifically to the naturalist and expressionist movements, and
to his influence on important American playwrights like Eugene O'Neill
and Edward Albee. In both contexts the Strindberg canon is defined in an
increasingly narrow manner to comprise a very small subset of his total
dramatic production.
In 1909 Selma Lagerlöf (1858-1940) became the first Swedish winner
of the Nobel Prize; in 1914 she also became the first woman member of the
Swedish Academy. Lagerlöf garnered a great deal of international atten­tion
from the beginning of her career; in particular, her first novel, Gösta
234
B e r l i n g s S a g a (1891), was widely admired and translated. A compelling
storyteller who drew on folklore and oral tradition, Lagerlöf may be clas­sified
as a neoromantic. One possible explanation for her popularity,
both in Sweden and abroad, is demographic. In Gösta B e r l i n g s S a g a and
other early narratives, Lagerlöfs subject matter and primary themes —
provincial life in previous generations and the redemptive power of love—
could speak to a relatively unsophisticated reading public as well as the
literati. Her religious moralizing may have endeared her to devout Swed­ish-
Americans. There is considerable evidence, moreover, that Lagerlöfs
primary audience was female;1 then as now, most books were purchased
and read by women. Presumably because of their anticipated popular
appeal, virtually all of Lagerlöf's early works were translated relatively
quickly, before the Nobel award: Gösta B e r l i n g in 1898; Osynliga länkar
(1894), as T h e Invisible Links, in 1899; A n t i k r i s t s miraklet (1897), as The
M i r a c l e s of A n t i c h r i s t , in 1899; E n herrgårdssägen (1899), as F r o m a Swedish
Homestead, in 1901; and Nils Holgerssons underbara resa genom Sverige (1906-
7), as T h e Wonderful Adventures of N i l s , in 1907. American publishers
include Little, Brown & Co. and Doubleday; rival British editions of sev­eral
works also appeared. The Nobel Prize thus did not introduce Lagerlöf
to the American audience, but it reinforced the perception of her as an
important writer, encouraged translations of subsequent works, and
motivated keeping older translations in print.
Unfortunately, all the early Lagerlöf translations are flawed. The vari­ous
translators, including Velma Swans on Howard and Pauline Bancroft
Flack, sometimes appear to lack the necessary linguistic skills in either
Swedish or English; errors and stylistic infelicities abound. The English-language
versions frequently convey an archaic quality that is completely
at odds with the colloquial, conversational tone of the original texts and
that leads to a false perception of Lagerlöf as quaint and dated. As far as
I can determine, most of Lagerlöf's novels and stories, with the exception
of Gösta Berling and the children's book Nils Holgersson, gradually waned
in popularity in the English-speaking world and went out of print before
World War II. Contributing factors were probably the decline of her repu­tation
in Sweden and the diminishing size and decreasing sense of eth­nic
solidarity of the Swedish-American population.
In the last fifteen years or so, in part thanks to feminist scholarship,
there has been renewed attention to Lagerlöf in Sweden. This revival has
not, by and large, led to a resurgence of interest in her works in the United
States. One new and greatly improved English-language version of a
minor masterpiece, The Löwensköld R i n g , appeared in England in 1991
under the aegis of Norvik Press—though by an American translator, Linda
235
Schenck—and has been a modest success.2 In the United States, Penfield
Press recently published several Lagerlöf volumes, including Gösta
B e r l i n g ' s Saga, but rather than commissioning fresh translations chose to
reissue slightly edited versions of old ones, with no critical apparatus
and a preface and introduction of only a single page apiece.3 In August
1997 the editor of the Lagerlöf series, Greta Anderson, sent me two of the
books and suggested that I contact the publisher, Joan Liffring-Zug
Bourret, about the possibility of retranslating Jerusalem. Commending the
press for its rediscovery of Lagerlöf but pointing out the drawbacks of
republishing outdated texts, I replied enthusiastically that I would in­deed
be interested in undertaking the task. After some delay, my offer was
declined, with the explanation that "much of the impact of Lagerlöfs
work for today's reader lies in the realization of the universality of char­acter,
time, and place. Some of the more archaic passages, in many in­stances,
tend to enhance the strength of this quality."4 Leaving aside the
fact that inappropriate and inaccurate archaisms, not to mention other
errors, hardly strengthen the universality of anything, I suspect that eco­nomics
played an unacknowledged role in the publisher's apparent
about-face: since the copyright on old Lagerlöf translations has expired,
reissuing them is inexpensive, whereas present-day translators, myself
included, expect remuneration. Unfortunately, it is highly unlikely that
any other commercial press will republish Lagerlöf as long as the Penfield
Press volumes are in print.
Lagerlöfs contemporary, Verner von Heidenstam (1859-1940), a
member of the Academy since 1912, received the Nobel award in 1916. In
this instance, a stronger connection between the prize and translation
into English may be discerned, as indicated by the title—Sweden's L a u r e ­ate:
Selected Poems—of the volume of Heidenstam's poetry that appeared
in 1919. To a greater degree than was the case with Lagerlöf, the work of
Heidenstam seems to have been translated with the Swedish-American
audience specifically in mind. Two volumes of prose from earlier de­cades
were issued by the American-Scandinavian Foundation in the 1920s,
by which time Heidenstam had ceased writing: K a r o l i n e r n a (1897-98),
T h e Charles M e n , in 1920, and S v e n s k a r n a och deras hövdingar (1908-10),
The Swedes and Their Chieftains, in 1925. That same year Knopf published
Folkungaträdet (1905-07), The T r e e of the F o l k u n g s . All are subjective, na­tionalistic
interpretations of Swedish history. Since the 1920s were the
heyday of Swedish America, it seems likely that targeted readers were the
children and grandchildren of immigrants in search of their glorious
heritage. The translator of all four Heidenstam volumes was C. W. Stork.
A third writer associated with the national romantic movement, the
236
poet Erik Axel Karlfeldt (1864-1931), received the award posthumously.
Of his production, only A r c a d i a Borealis: Selected Poems has appeared in
English, in 1938. Karlfeldt's limited exposure in the United States was
determined in large part by his choice of genre rather than subject matter.
Poetry, especially rhymed and metered verse, is notoriously difficult to
translate, and regardless of language of origin, it seldom sells well.
In contrast to predecessors like Lagerlöf and Heidenstam, Pär
Lagerkvist (1891-1974), who was awarded the Nobel in 1951, apparently
did not attract a primarily Swedish-American audience. One reason for
his appeal across ethnic boundaries may be that much of his literary
production is "Swedish" neither in setting nor in subject matter. Of the
novels that established his international reputation, The Dwarf takes place
during the Italian Renaissance and explores the nature of evil, while
Barabbas, The Sibyll, The Death of A h a s v e r u s , and other prose narratives
expand on biblical stories and address ageless existential questions. These
works, which originally appeared in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, were
all translated within a year or two, often by Alan Blair, published by
prestigious presses like Random House and Hill & Wang, and issued in
paperback. The Dwarf, Barabbas, and The Sibyll remain in print today. One
factor in the relative longevity of American interest in Lagerkvist may be
that his spare, simple, elegant prose has a timeless quality that survives
translation relatively unscathed.
Lagerkvist was also a playwright and theoretician of modern drama.
Though he builds on the expressionist tradition originating with
Strindberg, his primary sources of artistic inspiration are international
rather than specifically Swedish. The English-language volume M o d e r n
Theatre: Seven Plays and a n Essay appeared in 1966, many decades after
Swedish publication of most of the works included, and places his work
in the context of European theater history. As with Lagerkvist's novels,
the presumed intended audience is not a Swedish-American one but—in
this instance — anyone interested in the evolution of twentieth-century
drama.
Eyvind Johnson (1900-1976) and Harry Martinson (1904-1978)
shared the Nobel Prize in 1974. In neither instance were English transla­tions
of their work published in immediate response to the award. With
regard to Johnson, however, a possible parallel to Lagerkvist may be pro­posed,
since among translated works, historical fiction with a non-Swed­ish
setting predominates: Strändernas svall ( 1 9 4 6 ) / R e t u r n to Ithaca (1952)
is a retelling of the Odyssey; Drömmar om rosor och eld ( 1 9 4 9 ) / D r e a m s of
Roses and F i r e (1984) is set in the France of Cardinal Richelieu; H a n s nådes
tid (1960)/ The Days of H i s Grace (1968) takes place during the reign of
237
Charlemagne. Only the autobiographical N u var det 1 9 1 4 (1934)/1914
(1970) concerns a more immediate past and is set in Sweden.
Two early works of Martinson were translated into English almost
immediately: Kap Farväl (1933)/Cape Farewell (1934) and Nässlorna blomma
(1935)/Flowering Nettle (1936). Vägen till Klockrike (1948) appeared in 1955
as The Road. The last two were published in England; I have never lo­cated
them in an American library and presume that they had relatively
limited distribution here. Martinson's poem cycle A n i a r a , from 1956, is
the only work to appear in English after the prize, in 1991.
Vilhelm Moberg (1898-1973), a rebel and iconoclast like Strindberg,
cultivated an outsider role vis-å-vis the literary establishment and never
won the Nobel Prize. His novels are nevertheless critically acclaimed
and have remained extraordinarily popular with Swedish readers. In the
summer of 1998, viewers of Röda R u m m e t ( T h e R e d R o o m ) , a television
program that focuses on literature, chose Moberg's emigrant tetralogy as
"århundradets bok," the Swedish book of the century. The emigrant se­ries,
which appeared in Sweden between 1949 and 1959, has also been
successful in the United States, in particular, it seems, among Swedish-
Americans, no doubt because the subject matter has an intrinsic appeal
to that particular audience. The emigrant novels reached a more general
readership as well, however, especially after the second volume, U n t o a
Good Land, became a Book of the Month Club selection in 1954. Moberg's
novels have been almost continually in print in the United States since
their first publication; in 1978 the complete versions of volumes three
and four, T h e Settlers and Last Letter H o m e , even replaced the conflated
final volume of the original Simon & Schuster edition, and the entire
tetralogy was issued in paperback by Popular Library. More recently the
novels have been republished by the Minnesota Historical Society Press.
Interest in the emigrant tetralogy led to the translation of a later novel,
D i n s t u n d på j o r d e n (1963)/ O u r T i m e on E a r t h (1965), about a Swedish
American of Moberg's own generation, and eventually, in 1988, to an
English-language version of his volume of essays about Swedish settle­ment
in United States, D e n okända släkten/The Unknown Swedes. Even be­fore
the emigrant novels established Moberg's reputation in the United
States, several works from the 1930s and 1940s —the partially autobio­graphical
Knut Toring series and the historical novel R i d e This N i g h t—
had appeared in English.
Moberg belonged to the so-called 1930s generation in Swedish let­ters,
a group of writers from impoverished backgrounds who were largely
self-taught and whose fiction frequently focused on their class of origin.
Buoyed by American sales of The Emigrants and the forthcoming publica-
238
tion of U n t o a Good Land, Sonja Bergvall, in charge of foreign rights at
Sweden's largest publishing house, Albert Bonniers Förlag, hoped to
attract attention in the United States to another working-class writer, Ivar
Lo-Johansson. On 17 December 1953 she sent Moberg's translator, Gustaf
Lannestock, copies of two of Lo-Johansson novels, Analfabeten (The Illiter­ate)
and Gårdfarihandlaren ( T h e P e d d l e r ) , requesting his opinion of them
and of their possibilities in America.5
The Swedish-born Lannestock, though a businessman by profession,
was an extremely perceptive and discriminating translator. Lo-Johansson,
like Moberg, was sometimes controversial but popular and widely praised
by critics. The autobiographical narratives Lannestock was asked to con­sider,
Lo-Johansson's most recent publications at the time, are unusual
among works by Swedish proletarian writers in that they are short and
funny. Though the setting, rural Sweden during and immediately after
World War I, is unfamiliar to an American audience, the story of the
teenage protagonist's rebellion and of a society in transition is easily
accessible across cultural and linguistic boundaries. Bergvall's implicit
conviction that the Lo-Johansson novels could become as popular as the
Moberg series seems optimistic, but not farfetched.
On 22 January 1954 Lannestock replied with great enthusiasm:
The Ivar Lo-Johansson books have arrived and I have read
both of them with profound interest. Not for a longtime have I
had the refreshing experience to find such a charming sense of
humor in a Swedish writer of this quality. I shall indeed do all I
can to have them presented to American publishers, and I have
already taken the liberty to send résumés to my friend Harold
Strauss, Editor-in-Chief to Alfred Knopf, Inc. Should he be inter­ested,
I will forward the books to be read by their own Swedish
readers.
Lannestock goes on to request lists of sales and translations, information
on the author, favorable reviews, and publicity materials to aid him in the
placements of the novels.
A month later, on 23 February 1954—which coincidentally was Lo-
Johansson's fifty-third birthday—a follow-up letter from Lannestock re­ported
on his efforts:
I mailed a report of the two books to three firms I have con­nections
with. One has not yet answered; one has replied that
they know of the author but have "unfavorable reports" of his
239
earlier books. The most important one, Alfred Knopf, writes that
they have considered the Lo-Johansson books ever since 1939
when Mr. Knopf was in Stockholm. Analfabeten was rejected
last year after their Swedish readers had advised them it was "a
depressing, naive and rather crude peasant tale."6
Undeterred, Lannestock relates that he had begun translating
Analfabeten anyway. On 1 March 1954 Sonja Bergvall sent a contract au­thorizing
him to translate Analfabeten and Gårdfarihandlaren "into the
American language" and to act as Bonniers's agent for sales of American
rights. Just a week later, on 8 March 1954, Lannestock assured her that he
was going ahead with the work and mentioned hopefully that Knopf,
despite the earlier rejection, had expressed interest in seeing it.
On 17 April 1954 Lannestock informed Sonja Bergvall that he had
sent several chapters of Analfabeten to Knopf and that "the rest should be
ready shortly." His admiration for Lo-Johansson had deepened, and he
now made additional inquiries about an earlier novel, Bara en mor/Only a
Mother,
There ensued a silence of more than half a year. On 1 November 1954
Lannestock notified Sonja Bergvall that the English manuscript of
Analfabeten had been examined by six publishing houses, all of which
had turned it down. Though he was still trying, he told Bergvall to place
the translation directly if she could, their previous agreement notwith­standing.
On 13 December 1954 Bergvall replied to Lannestock:
Both Mr. Lo-Johansson and myself are very glad and very
grateful that you are taking so much trouble over Analfabeten. It is
very sad, however, that the book does not seem to appeal so much
to American publishers as one would have hoped. I suppose
Simon & Schuster who have already had success with a Swed­ish
author are among the publishers who have seen your trans­lation.
Mr. Lo-Johansson feels that, being a "funnier" book, per­haps
Gårdfarihandlaren might have a better chance. What do you
think of his opinion?
She thanked Lannestock for his offer of a free hand to place the novel
directly, but still thought he was more likely to succeed.
And there the correspondence ends. Lannestock never did find an
American publisher for his translation of Analfabeten. After his death, the
manuscript, along with his other papers, was deposited at the Emigrant
240
Institute in Växjö, Sweden, where it remains today. With the exception of
the erotic novel Lyckan, translated as Bodies of Love in the 1960s, no work
of Lo-Johansson appeared in English until the 1990s, when the short­lived
Scandinavian Literature in Translation series at the University of
Nebraska Press published my English version of Godnatt, jord/Breaking
Free, and Robert E. Bjork's of Bara en mor/Only a M o t h e r . In 1995 Camden
House issued my translation of Gårdfarihandlaren/Peddling M y Wares, the
second novel in the series that had so appealed to Gustaf Lannestock
more than forty years earlier. All three volumes have sold abysmally.
What can be learned from this cautionary tale? Why didn't
Lannestock's efforts pay off? There is no way to know for certain, but
some possible contributing factors may be proposed. First, it appears that
Swedish authors have no intrinsic appeal and no coattails. Moberg's
success in America did not persuade publishers to take a chance on Lo-
Johansson, to them an unknown with no name recognition and no obvi­ous
audience niche. Second, even a skilled and dedicated translator,
known and respected for his previous work, can do little to counteract
negative readers' reports, especially since these reports remain anony­mous
and unavailable to outsiders. Third—and this is a bit of practical
advice, not supposition—no translator should work on spec, that is, with­out
first having signed a publisher's contract.
With regard to the embarrassingly low sales of recent Lo-Johansson
translations, the lesson is that academic presses often cannot afford to
market books effectively. Their catalogues seldom reach people outside
the university community; even within that group, few people will buy a
novel by an unfamiliar writer without at least having read a favorable
review. By publishing Swedish novels only in hardback and at exorbi­tant
prices with the motivation that only a few libraries will order them—
a line of reasoning that soon becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy—univer­sity
presses often doom books to the remainder table. Though I suppose
an expensive and essentially undisseminated translation is marginally
better than none at all, academic publishers, with few exceptions, simply
are not an appropriate venue for translated fiction. Unfortunately, in
today's publishing climate, they may be the only venue available.
Though translators from some languages can actually make a living
as practitioners of the art, this is hardly the situation with regard to Swed­ish.
To my knowledge, there is currently in the world only one full-time
professional translator of literary texts from Swedish to English, the enor­mously
prolific Englishwoman Joan Tate. In Great Britain, and some­times
in the United States, commercial publishers turn to her, or to some­one
she recommends, on the rare occasions when they option a Swedish
241
work, with the result that American readers of contemporary Swedish
fiction may encounter a distinctly British flavor that seems "foreign" but
in quite the wrong way, with completely misleading associations. In the
United States, most translators of modern Swedish literature are academ­ics
motivated by love for a particular work who are paid little or nothing,
discover that literary translation seldom counts for much in promotion
and tenure decisions, and often spend years peddling their novel or po­etry
collection to university presses before finding one that grudgingly
will agree to publish it. Under these circumstances, it is surprising that
any work of Swedish literature ever gets translated and published at all.
When something does appear, it is often thanks to the commitment
and persistence of the translator. Robert E. Bjork, for instance, is single-handedly
responsible for the fact that six novels of Jan Fridegård, a con­temporary
of Moberg and Lo-Johansson, were published in the Univer­sity
of Nebraska series between 1985 and 1990. Similarly, the novels of
Lars Gustafsson are available in English primarily due to the efforts of
the late Yvonne Sandstroem and her cooperation with New Directions, a
small press specializing in avant garde literature. Occasionally, how­ever,
a work of Swedish literature is issued by a more mainstream pub­lisher
aiming to reach a particular audience. In this regard the novels of
Kerstin Ekman provide an illuminating example.
Born in 1933, Ekman began her career as a writer of crime fiction.
Although she was elected a member of the Swedish Academy in 1978
and has long been considered one of the country's foremost contempo­rary
novelists, no work of hers was published in English until 1996,
when Blackwater (Händelser vid vatten) appeared with St. Martin's Press.7
I suspect that the catalyst was the previous success in both England and
the United States of Danish writer Peter Høeg's S m i l l a ' s Sense of Snow.
Both S m i l l a and Blackwater may be classified as "serious fiction" but in­corporate
an exotic setting and components of mystery and suspense;
and both, though in quite different ways, criticize technology in the ser­vice
of hidden economic interests and promote ecological values. Black-water
was favorably reviewed in the N e w York Times Book Review but pro­moted
primarily as a mystery novel. Presumably to capitalize on the suc­cess
of Blackwater, in 1997 Doubleday published a much earlier and more
straightforward work of crime fiction, D e tre små mästarna (1961), as Under
the S n o w . 8 Both novels were translated by Joan Tate. Quite coincidentally,
at virtually the same time Norvik Press issued a completely divergent
work, Witches' Rings (Häxringarna, 1974), the first novel of a tetralogy that
provides an alternative history of the railroad town Katrineholm by por­traying
the lives of women and children. Norvik Press, distributed in the
242
United States by Dufour Editions, specializes in Scandinavian literature
but aims at an academic market, possibly hoping, in this instance, to
build on the success of Lagerlöf's The Löwensköld R i n g . Both novels were
written by women, focus largely on female characters, and lend them­selves
to inclusion in courses on women's literature, and both were trans­lated
by Linda Schenck.
At present, Swedish literature has little or no impact in the United
States. The sole audience likely to seek out a translated work simply
because the author was a Swede—that is, second- or third-generation
Swedish Americans who feel a sense of kinship with the country and
culture of their forebears—is declining in number and advancing in age.
The American educational system, from elementary school through the
university, does little to foster an interest in or awareness of foreign litera­ture
in general; many teachers—indeed, many English departments—
present and discuss all literary texts, regardless of country and language
of origin, as if they were written in English. With the increasing domina­tion
of television and other forms of popular entertainment, fewer and
fewer people read at all.
There is, furthermore, no such thing as the "American audience" in
an all-inclusive sense. Unlike Sweden, the United States does not have a
handful of prominent newspapers that carry on a cultural debate fol­lowed
by a large percentage of the population. Both major Stockholm
papers, D a g e n s N y h e t e r and Svenska Dagbladet, frequently publish, in ad­dition
to reviews of new works of literature, feature articles about both
Swedish and non-Swedish authors, written by prominent literary schol­ars
and critics. The closest equivalents in the United States are the N e w
Y o r k Times Book R e v i e w and the N e w Y o r k Review of Books, which reach a
much smaller percentage of the population, a group assumed to be in­trinsically
interested in and well-informed about literary matters. What
the United States does have are many different audiences or population
subgroups with special interests that are targeted by the publishing in­dustry:
readers of historical fiction, of romance novels, of mysteries, of
fantasy and science fiction, and so forth. In the last decade or two, vari­ous
changes in the way books are marketed and distributed—not only
this focus on niche audiences, but also the dominance of bookstore chains
and the relentless promotion of megabits—have made it more and more
difficult to publish serious literature of any kind. Under these circum­stances,
the occasional discovery of a Swedish writer by an American
audience can only be described as serendipity.
243
ENDNOTES
1. Of the more than 10,000 letters addressed to Lagerlöf now housed at the
Royal Library, Stockholm, approximately 65 percent are from women, accord­ing
to Jennifer Watson-Madler, who has worked extensively with the collection
(e-mail message from Watson-Madler to Rochelle Wright, 4 October 1998).
2. In her afterword, Schenck provides a detailed comparison with the ear­lier
English version from 1928 and makes a compelling argument for fresh,
contemporary translations of classic works of literature.
3. The publisher defines the procedure as "minor editing of only the me­chanics"
(letter from Joan Liffring-Zug Bourret to Rochelle Wright, 3 December
1997); in other words, typos and obvious mistakes in grammar and punctua­tion
are corrected, but nothing else. The editor does not know Swedish and has
not examined the original texts. The lack of a serious critical introduction to
Lagerlöfs oeuvre or to the individual works also limits the usefulness of the
translations. The Penfield Press Gösta Berling is based on Lillie Tucker's rendi­tion,
first published in England in 1898 and reissued by the American-Scandina­vian
Foundation in 1918.
4. Letter from Joan Liffring-Zug Bourret to Rochelle Wright, 3 December
1997.
5. The correspondence between Sonja Bergvall and Gustaf Lannestock is
stored in the Placement Division files of the archive at Albert Bonniers Förlag,
Stockholm. Bergvall's letters are quoted with the permission of Bonniers; the
Emigrant Institute, Växjö, allows citation of the Lannestock letters. Both Bergvall
and Lannestock, though native Swedes, wrote in English; after many decades
in the United States, Lannestock felt more comfortable using that language.
6. Knopf could not have considered Analfabeten and Gårdfarihandlaren in
1939, since they had not yet been published; the reference may be to Godnatt,
jord (1933) or, more likely, Bara en mor (1939).
7. Ekman resigned in 1989 in protest over the Academy's lukewarm de­fense
of Salman Rushdie.
8. Readers of Ekman's work in the Swedish original might justifiably con­sider
this a more appropriate rubric for the transitional novel Pukehornet, which
takes its title from the slum district of Uppsala where the story is set but fea­tures
a presumed corpse hidden under snowdrifts in the forest.
244